Yeah the two factors are ideological upper management, reinforced by incompetent middle management.
Upper management just imagines people leaning back on their porch, smoking a blunt all day, and it enrages them, it burns in their stomachs, and no eggheaded cost/benefit analysis will get them past the psychological burden of knowing someone might be exploiting them instead of the other way around.
Incompetent middle management doesn't organize people, doesn't plan projects, doesn't clear workloads to focus on priority work, doesn't move resources around to help people in need, and so on. They don't help their underlings. All they do is alternate between monitoring, reporting, criticism, or discipline. This doesn't do anything productive, and so their selling point to upper management is "something about my proximity obviously prevents chaos and slacking, somehow"
When there is no proximity, it's harder for incompetent managers to justify their existence.
Awful!!! I once worked at a pretty good place but my weird niche job position meant that I was the only person who reported to someone I didn't actually work with. It was the second in command.
So he had absolutely no clue what I did, and like in yearly reviews I'd get a sudden horrible rating in certain areas like "responsiveness" or whatever, based on literally 2 anonymous lines of a text message from someone 10 months ago, when 9.5 months ago I proudly fixed exactly the issue in question even though it wasn't my fault. Shit like that. The whole process of review was built around people who worked together daily, with their manager actually hands on and helping... except for me.
So even though the place was good, even though the CEO was one of the least CEO-brained people in that position, and almost everyone was nice, it became completely fucking unbearable and I quit
Yeah the two factors are ideological upper management, reinforced by incompetent middle management.
Upper management just imagines people leaning back on their porch, smoking a blunt all day, and it enrages them, it burns in their stomachs, and no eggheaded cost/benefit analysis will get them past the psychological burden of knowing someone might be exploiting them instead of the other way around.
Incompetent middle management doesn't organize people, doesn't plan projects, doesn't clear workloads to focus on priority work, doesn't move resources around to help people in need, and so on. They don't help their underlings. All they do is alternate between monitoring, reporting, criticism, or discipline. This doesn't do anything productive, and so their selling point to upper management is "something about my proximity obviously prevents chaos and slacking, somehow"
When there is no proximity, it's harder for incompetent managers to justify their existence.
This totally describes my boss, except he is almost never in the office. But he is essentially just there to criticize me. Which is pretty annoying
Awful!!! I once worked at a pretty good place but my weird niche job position meant that I was the only person who reported to someone I didn't actually work with. It was the second in command.
So he had absolutely no clue what I did, and like in yearly reviews I'd get a sudden horrible rating in certain areas like "responsiveness" or whatever, based on literally 2 anonymous lines of a text message from someone 10 months ago, when 9.5 months ago I proudly fixed exactly the issue in question even though it wasn't my fault. Shit like that. The whole process of review was built around people who worked together daily, with their manager actually hands on and helping... except for me.
So even though the place was good, even though the CEO was one of the least CEO-brained people in that position, and almost everyone was nice, it became completely fucking unbearable and I quit